Harm is biggest deal when religion does it

INTRODUCTION

Christianity says you need prayerful faith in Jesus to be a good person. Some religions say you need to be in them to be good. In some way, many faith systems say their teachings and practices have a good moral/spiritual effect. Christians say this happens to the practitioner through grace - the help of God.
No matter they explain it it sounds pompous. And it sounds pompous because it is.

“I sin and do bad but I would be worse if I were not a person of faith".  It is obvious how thin and dubious that is!  It's a disgraceful assertion.  It is a trick for how do you test something so important?  And even Scientologists and Satanists could use the argument and in fact do!  But each religion when it uses it is only referring to itself.

For these reasons a religion should be abandoned faster than any other kind of organisation when it does bad or allows bad or uses such ridiculous and crafty logic as that!  It needs to be held to a higher standard than anything else for it claims to be the moral guardian.

VIOLENCE AND FAITH

A country is torn apart with wars of religion. If the religion were to vanish or had never been would the wars still happen?

What if they would?

We can’t know that.

We can’t know that the wars would be as bad.

What if war happens?  At least we are not fighting over religious theory and divisions caused by religious doctrine.  Baptism into a religion as a child is one big cause of division.

Religion claims to have good principles that secularism or irreligious social entities cannot match. It sees itself as an improvement. It knows that principles have a placebo effect for you feel they are always true no matter what happens. It claims to be able to do more than just influence. It claims it actually has got powers and energies that can heal the human heart of its love for evil and for fake goodness. For these two reasons, a religion must be judged by how its members are living. A religion must never be allowed to argue that it is good even if the members are not. There is no other way to assess. A religion of good principles that is populated by too many monsters and hypocrites is still a bad religion. And it is abusing the good principles by applying them like a facemask. For the sake of principle you have to use the exit door.

To say it would be as bad without religion as with it is still calling religion bad for it claims to be special when it is not.

To say it would be worse is just a declaration of war on secularists and those who disagree strongly with your religious views.  It is putting you well on the way to hate speech.

IN DEPTH STUDY

When an organisation that claims to be God's authorised family and his Church lies and causes harm it is a bigger deal than if any political entity does it. Why? Because you would expect it more of the political entity and the political entity is not claiming to be the work of a God whose ways and rules we cannot completely understand. There is thus more hope in theory of fixing the political entity - it in principle has teachings that can be revised for they did not drop down out of Heaven. If a religion is revised that is thanks to luck and the hypocrites and the rebels. It does not mean that the religion is intrinsically open to correction. Religion believes that revisers are really inventing a new religion. So they are!
 
The religion claims to be in touch with a God who uses evil for a purpose - thus the evil it does is excused. Consider how AIDS is spread by Catholics refusing to give condoms to the poor. Politics can't have a moral loophole like that. Also, belief in God forces you to risk making excuses for the inexcusable. You have to say that God lets babies suffer for a good reason though you might never find out what it is. But that is only your opinion or belief. You don't know it. The risk can be seen as a necessary evil in the religious mindset. The atheist sees taking this risk as inexcusable itself. She sees it as trying to stop yourself from seeing the full horror of it (it is egotistical to look at somebody's suffering and to water down the empathy to a level that makes you feel less terrible) and as saying to you, "There is no God to help those babies. Go and help them. If you are really helping them you will not have the need or time to try and tell yourself that the suffering babies are part of some supernatural plan." Religion taking the risk is religion using God dangerously.
 
Catholics supported the Catholic Church regardless of all the slaughter and violence it got up to centuries ago on the basis that no matter what it does, it is still Christ's Church and it serves no purpose to leave it. This doctrine leads to enabling. If it is Christ's Church then they did right (assuming Christ really did come from God) but if it is man-made they prove that their hands are stained with blood. If it is Christ's Church and they believed without having sufficient evidence then their hands are still stained with blood. Catholicism is not the only religion with this problem. There is a risk when any community claims to be God's inspired faith community.